SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

Bard nodded. “Then let us pray Haakon’s forefathers had some sense in their skulls the day they set this stone.” He trailed down the statue’s right arm and pointed the direction it led.

“We’ve our path, it seems,” Devin said.

Arndt shrugged. “The Valkyr will find us no matter where our carcasses collapse, so lead on, my friends.”

“Such optimism, brother.” Hilde chuckled low in her throat, yet didn’t hesitate scything through the fog as she marched on. “Stay close,” she warned, though she need not have wasted her breath. Bard and the others hounded her heels, near to tripping over her. For all their bluster, the trepidation that wafted from his companions soured Bard’s tongue, but his own fear tasted no less bitter.

Every step was plagued by thoughts of the corpses beneath their feet, and time slipped past unknown as they made their way through the crowded necropolis. Thunder rattled the heavens, a somber serenade to their uneasy flight. Bard had lost all sense of direction not twenty paces after the statue had faded behind them, and he prayed Hilde steered them true, but he could not tamp his growing nerves that festered with each step. Bard expected draugar — the animated bones of those long accursed — to step out from the fog, and his nostrils flared as he strove for even a hint of the unmistakable stench of decay. He glanced about wildly, certain he felt more than just the virulence of the dead upon them, only then realizing he could see his brothers without having to strain to do so.

“Wait,” he whispered, raising a closed fist. The others slowed and gathered about him, expressions uncertain.

Hilde grasped his concern first. “The mist lifts.”

Her proclamation seemed to rally the fading tendrils of gray as they drifted toward the lightening sky, the clouds thinning. A frigid wind crept in as if to fill the wound left by the departing fog. It sent a chill scurrying along Bard’s arms.

“They’ll be coming for us.” No sooner had the words left his mouth than a gargled hiss cleaved the air. A dozen more followed it. He tightened his grip on his ax as recognition of what wended toward them sunk home.

The first of Haakon’s beasts cleared the edges of the retreating fog. Bard held his ground despite the terror that urged him to flee. With a crazed howl it charged at them. Sleek like serpents, Haakon’s creatures were preternatural; nidhoggr, they were called — the name given them springing to Bard’s mind of its own accord — summoned from the bowels of Hel, and though they came only up to the víkingr’s knees, their bodies slithered out for yards behind, while feral, bear-like mouths with row upon row of jagged shards comprised their ill-shapen snouts. Four milky-white eyes glared at them with malevolence, deformed lumps of hate bubbling from the hairless skull of the closest beast. Their multitudinous legs scrabbled while their sharpened claws clacked a dirge along the packed earth.

An instant later, the beasts were on them.

Hilde was first to draw blood. She slammed her buckler into the mouth of the nearest nidhogg and drove her blade beneath its slathering chin. The sword broke through the hardened bone and pierced its skull, severing its unnatural ties to this world. Hilde booted its corpse aside and met the next, but Bard could watch no longer; he had his own to contend with.

The nearest nidhogg crouched as if it might go for his legs, but Bard had seen the creatures’ tricks. He ducked low as the creature changed tack and leapt high. It sailed overhead and Bard thrust the point of his ax into the beast’s belly, spun it about, and drove it back to earth with a sickening crunch. Its ribs shattered within its chest and it shrieked in agony, a dozen claws slashing at empty air, but there was no time to revel in one monster’s defeat.

Bard drew back a few paces and swung his ax as another serpent-beast flew at him. Steel and bone collided and the creature fell away, its head cleaved in twain. A third beast caught the haft upside its skull on the backswing and thumped senseless to the grass with a muffled whimper. Bard took rapid breaths and glanced from its twitching form to see Devin cutting a swathe through a trio of nidhoggr, their rancid blood and severed limbs cavorted in the air about him like some knife juggler’s morbid finale.

Arndt lacked Devin’s grace. He grunted and frothed as he swept his greatsword two-handed in wide, arcing swings. Muscles bunched beneath his sun-scarred skin as the warrior put the whole of his strength into every blow. Nidhoggr flopped at his feet in pieces, howls and ragged grunts slipping from their foul mouths as they curled in on themselves and died. Yet more came, as if they knew Arndt’s ferocity would prove his undoing when the warrior’s strength flagged.

One found truth in that presumption.